HOW TO HIRE A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT TO MANAGE YOUR CONTENT AND SOCIAL MEDIA
If you are at a point in your business where you can use some help to create and manage content for your social media – you might be ready to hire your first virtual assistant! Actually, one of the very first things our clients delegate to us as a VA agency, is their social media management! So we 100% suggest that this is something you plan to delegate early on in your entrepreneurial journey.
Not only is this going to give you that extra time to spend doing the things that bring you the highest return in your business, but delegating is going to allow you to scale and grow. Many people jump into this step however without the proper plan in place before hiring their first virtual assistant and content support contractor. Luckily, we are pros at this so we wanted to share some tips to help you delegate this part of your business to a new VA.
1. Have a quality long-form content strategy in place
First things first, we believe that if you wish to have the highest return for your time on social media – to grow your website visitors and increase your customer conversions, we recommend you ensure to create a minimum of 1-2 quality long-form pieces of content per month to start with. When I say long-form content, I mean on a subject that your ideal clients are directly looking for answers to and that these subjects directly relate to the offerings that you have within your business.
Examples of long form content can be a blog article, a youtube video or podcast – anything that is between 5-20 minutes to read or listen to. Within this content, you are ensuring that your titles, your copy and images are all optimized with your brand’s keywords that relate to the type of customers you are looking to attract in your business.
Having this strategy in place will provide your virtual assistant with loads of resources to use to share to your social audiences, but not only that, it will constantly be driving traffic to your website – even after the post on instagram has disappeared into the algorithm.
2. Develop you content pillars and have graphic templates for each
The next thing you need to do for social media is to establish what your content pillars are. We recommend starting with 6 pillars which are the foundational ideas being the content you wish to share on social media.
For instance, if you are a real estate agent, you may plan your content pillars in this way:
- 1. Listings (Sold and New)
- 2. Advice for Buyers and Sellers
- 3. Real Estate Wealth Advice
- 4. Inspiration + Quotes + Testimonials
- 5. Things I love
- 6. Community news
Within these 6 content pillars, you would then make sure to prepare branded graphic templates for each of these types of content so that your Virtual Assistant can maintain a branded professional image for your company across all platforms. We recommend having 2-3 different templates for each content type.
With branded templates, your VA will spend less time designing, and more time putting together great ideas and engaging content to attract your audience.
3. Establish your brand voice and provide direction for your VA
One very important thing to note is that your Virtual Assistant needs to have a clear understanding of who your audience is, who your ideal customers are and what your brand voice is. He or she will need to maintain a certain tone of voice in the overall copywriting of your content that sounds like what you would have written, so we highly recommend preparing a summary of your brand guidelines and target market summary so that the work is clearly representing your brand.
A lot of business-owners miss this part and it’s crucial for you to build a team that understands your overall goals adequately and can fully represent your brand online because they have all the information available to them.
4. Ensure your content is leading back to a well-designed website
This is a big one!! We cannot stress enough just how important it is to have a website that is not only well-designed, but also has high converting sales pages and offers. The overall goal is to attract new potential customers from social media onto your website…but then what? What is the strategy on your website to retain them?
Do you have a freebie offer? Are your services or products clear and optimized on your site? Is your website easy to navigate and is it crystal clear who your target audience is on your website so your visitors feel spoken to? Is it also easy to get in touch with you?
Before jumping into any heavy social media efforts for your business, we highly recommend ensuring that your website is ready to receive new visitors and turn them into either paying customers or at minimum, subscribers to your newsletter via a freebie or other incentive.
5. Be clear on how many hours you wish to spend on each platform to create an overall budget for the content planning for your business
Another highly important step to take before hiring your Virtual Assistant is to manage your social media account is to really be clear on your overall objectives and hours that you wish to have spent on each platform per week. Having a clear understanding of the time needed to perform each part of the process will allow you to plan your overall monthly budget for this new hire and ensure it balances out to the return on investment not only in new clients but also in the time it frees up for you as a business owner to grow your company and your income.
With a set weekly hours dedicated to your content management – you will be able to clearly direct your Virtual Assistant and place the emphasis on whatever is most important to you and your business. Your VA will love having a clear weekly and monthly plan to follow and this will help you to generate great results from your new team member!
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We hope these tips will help you as you plan to hire a VA to help you manage your content planning and social media marketing. If you follow these steps, you will see how much clearer your head will be when strategizing and onboarding your new team member.
As always, we are here to help you grow your brand – If you are looking for a new Virtual Assistant to join your team – well you are in the right place because our Toronto-based Virtual Assistant Agency trains a team of amazing creative VAs that specialize in content creation and digital marketing. We would love to hear more about your business and your overall goals and see how we can best help you achieve them.
Reach out by clicking here to book a Discovery Call with our team so we can discuss your overall goals and plan the right service for your company.
Thank you again, and wishing you a successful rest of your day and week ahead.
The Bloom Team